Analogies between the stage and the screen assume that they deal with the same material. But they don't. The material of the scree...n is not actual objects but images fixed on the film. And the very fact that they have their being on film endows these images with properties which are never found in actual objects. For instance, on the stage the actor moves in real space and time. He cannot even cross the room without performing a definite number of movements. On the screen an action may be shown only in terminal points with all its intervening moments left out. Similarly, in watching a performance on the stage the spectator is governed by the actual conditions of space and time. Not so in the case of the movie spectator. Thanks to the moving camera he is able to view the scene from all kinds of angles, leaping from a long-distance view to a close-range inspection of every detail. It is obvious that with this extraordinary power of handling space and time--by elimination and emphasis, according to its dramatic needs--the motion picture can never be content with modeling itself after the stage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the b...uffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,--these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,--and this would always be his.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historic...al struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Sin has always been an ugly word, but it has been made so in a new sense over the last half-century. It has been made not only ugl...y but passé. People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

One might compare the journey of the soul to mystical union, by way of pure faith, to the journey of a car on a dark highway. The ...only way the driver can keep to the road is by using his headlights. So in the mystical life, reason has its function. The way of faith is necessarily obscure. We drive by night. Nevertheless our reason penetrates the darkness enough to show us a little of the road ahead. It is by the light of reason that we interpret the signposts and make out the landmarks along our way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

If you say to me: "Master, it would seem that you weren't too terribly wise to have written these bits of nonsense and pleasant mo...ckeries," I respond that you are hardly more so in finding amusement in reading them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I have had no other treasure in this world than to see you once perfect and complete, as much in virtue, honesty and wisdom, as in... all free and honest learning, and so leave you after my death like a mirror representing my person--your father--if not as excellent in fact as I would wish, certainly so in desire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »